The Reykjavik Confessions Page 3

  Erla had been living with her dad, Bolli, in his apartment in Hafnarfjordur. There wasn’t much to it, two interconnecting living/bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry room. Erla asked her dad if Saevar could stay with them, which would mean Saevar sharing Erla’s single bed. Her Dad agreed but had one condition, ‘that Saevar needed to do some honest work and get a proper job’. Saevar did occasionally try to enter the world of normal work but it never lasted. He did a stint in the fishing trade out in the Westfjords, but he couldn’t stick it. Saevar was not going to follow a conventional path.

  In February 1974 Saevar was arrested again by Kristjan Petursson. Rather than taking him to the police station or prison, Petursson brought him to his home where he offered him a drink. He wanted Saevar to confess to the biggest jewellery robbery that had ever been committed in Iceland. Saevar said he knew nothing about it but Erla said he later told her, ‘He was frustrated that someone else had gotten away with it. It was a crime he would have liked to get away with, he was always very curious who had done it.’ When this soft approach didn’t work Saevar was taken to Sidumuli for another stint in solitary confinement, this time for a month. Saevar got out of trouble by informing on his fellow small-time dealer and friend, Sigurbor Stefansson, who surprisingly stood by him. (‘I told him I would never do any business with him but I would be his friend.’)

  In the 1970s Iceland was still a land of prohibition. There were only three government-run off licences in Reykjavik where you could get expensive spirits but no beer, which was banned, and remained illegal until 1989. This created the ideal environment for cheap smuggled booze and for petty criminals like Saevar to make some money.

  Saevar had the gift of the gab and a charm that enabled him to enlist his friends in his criminal schemes. One of these involved exploiting a friend working at the docks where the legal alcohol was shipped in. Saevar would visit him for a chat to distract him so his friends Kristjan and Albert could steal whatever alcohol they could get their hands on. It was hardly a master criminal enterprise but it worked. Over several trips they built up a hoard of whisky, cognac and vodka. Erla was their ‘fence’ who would sell it to her co-workers at the Icelandic Post and Telephone company. As Friday approached, she became popular for being able to get alcohol to get the weekend started.

  Saevar needed a longer term regular source of income, however, and he went for the other big vice in 1970s Iceland, drugs. Kristjan Vidar was always at his side; after all, it didn’t hurt to have a well built, tall friend with a reputation for violence to look out for you. Saevar didn’t fit in with the prevailing hippy vibe of the drug dealing community. ‘He was a stranger when he came into the hash business,’ his friend Sigurdor observed, ‘and not many people liked him or Kristjan because they were from the other side, they were not hippies.’

  Saevar’s drug dealing meant leaving Erla alone for days whilst he went overseas to buy hashish. Erla was the only one working and bringing in a regular wage and by July 1974 she had had enough of her wayward boyfriend. Erla found out he was cheating on her. It was the final straw and she told him it was over, this time for good. Saevar could see she was serious and he lashed out, kicking her in the stomach with his steel toe-capped boots. The blow meant Erla couldn’t walk properly for several days.

  With Saevar out of her life, Erla had a new freedom. She headed to the Westmann islands for their annual music festival. There she met a new man. He was French and, unlike Saevar, he respected her. She could see a future without the chaos and instability of Saevar, but her time apart from him wasn’t to last very long.

  Erla’s relationship with Saevar had created a rift with her family. In her early life she hadn’t known her half brother Einar, but after her parents split she got to know him. She was in awe of the basketball legend and the two became close. But Einar couldn’t stand Saevar and had persuaded her dad to sell the apartment in Hafnarfjordur, forcing Erla to move. With no one else to turn to, she had to ask Saevar to help her. He used his forceful charm to manoeuvre himself back into her life, promising her this time things would be different. He had developed in interest in filmmaking and he told her he would direct a film and transform their lives, but he needed money to finance his project. He had no intention of working to earn it, instead he came up with a scheme to steal it from Erla’s employers, the Icelandic Post and Telephone company. It was this scam that would be his undoing.

  Saevar and Erla had found a flaw in the system for wiring money. Erla used her insider knowledge of the post office codes to pretend they were wiring money from abroad and then Erla would go and collect it using a fake identity. On their first attempt they got away with almost half a million kronor, but for Erla it wasn’t about cash: ‘I never really thought about what I would do with the money. It was to piss off the system and show them they were stupid.’ Although she had a false ID and forged a signature, Erla was nervous that as an employee of the phone and telegraph company she would be spotted.

  In total they embezzled a million kronor – around $10,000 – a sizeable sum at the time, enough to put down a deposit on a house. Saevar wanted to pull off the perfect crime, one that couldn’t be solved. It would be his way to get back at the authorities who he felt had bullied and harassed him since he was a child. Erla was also driven by a similar desire to hit back at the establishment: ‘It was all about getting away with it and laughing at them, to get back at all of them. All who were stupid and mean and unjust and all these rich people were assholes. I was really angry.’

  Saevar gave 300,000 kronor to his friend Vilhjalmur Knudsen who was a filmmaker, who in return let Saevar borrow his film equipment. That still left hundreds of thousands of kronor spare. Erla splashed out on a sporty white 1968 Mustang with green stripes down the sides. They weren’t sure what else to do with the money. They couldn’t suddenly buy a property as that would attract too much attention. There was nothing else they particularly desired, so they stashed it away in a wardrobe, raiding it when they needed money for food. Their only extravagance was a night in the upmarket Icelandair hotel complete with room service.

  As the months rolled on, Saevar thought he had got away with the crime, that he had fooled the police. But Iceland is a small place and Saevar had a big mouth. The police were watching and listening waiting to make their move. Then, in November 1974, the police had a new case land on their desk, one which would dominate the work of the small detective force for years.

  2

  19 November 1974

  Geirfinnur Einarsson lived an ordinary life but his name would be remembered for decades in Iceland. He lived in the industrial town of Keflavik, 30 miles from the capital. As well as being home to the sprawling US airbase, Keflavik is a port from where fishing boats set out to harvest cod from the cold waters of the Atlantic, processing them in the plants surrounding the harbour. Geirfinnur made his living doing manual labour and often had to work away from home, leaving his wife Gudni and young children, Sigridur and Anna Birgitta.

  Geirfinnur was a man of simple pleasures and didn’t go out much. His life revolved around work and his family and the occasional evening out with friends. On the evening of 19 November, he was planning to relax after a hard day at work by seeing a movie with a friend, Thordur Ingimarsson. But when Thordur arrived at the wide, grey, pebble-dashed house on Brekkubraut, his friend had some bad news, he had to cancel their evening out. Geirfinnur had been called to a meeting with some men in the Hafnarbudin, the simple cafe in Keflavik harbour where fishermen would gather for a smoke, a decent cup of coffee and bearable food. Thordur offered his friend a lift to his rendezvous.

  It was a short drive through the quiet roads towards the Hafnarbudin, looking out over a jetty to the thrashing Atlantic Ocean. Geirfinnur told his friend about the strange nature of the meeting, that he had been asked to come alone and on foot. Geirfinnur was not his usual self; he seemed edgy, even suggesting he should be armed, which was so out of keeping with his friend’s usual character that Thordur was sure
he was joking – or at least he hoped he was. As they drove towards the harbour, Geirfinnur speculated that the meeting might be a hoax, a cheap joke played by one of his workmates. Thordur had no idea who his friend was meeting or why.

  Sure enough, when Geirfinnur reached the cafe there was no mysterious person there to meet him. Gudlaug Jonssdottir had worked at the harbour cafe long enough to know her regulars and immediately recognised the quietly spoken and unassuming Geirfinnur, as he would often stop by late in the evening and buy some cigarettes. He did the same this night and, frustrated at what he thought was a prank, he returned home.

  Shortly after walking in his front door, the phone rang at Geirfinnur’s house. During the short conversation his wife overheard Geirfinnur clearly say, annoyed, ‘I’ve already been there’. It sounded like the person Geirfinnur was supposed to meet at Hafnarbudin was summoning him back there. Although it was now after ten, he headed out once again, this time driving there himself in his red Ford Cortina. He parked it 200 metres from the cafe with the keys still in the ignition, traipsing across the muddy ground and the narrow road to the cafe, one of a group of sturdy low rise buildings facing out to sea.

  When he hadn’t returned home the next morning his wife, Gudni was in a panic. This was out of character for Geirfinnur and she phoned the police to check if there had been accidents reported overnight. A friend came over to keep Gudni company while she waited, but still Geirfinnur failed to show up or phone her. A day later Geirfinnur’s boss reported him missing.

  Valtyr Sigurdsson was in his cramped office in Keflavik trying to get through the usual mountain of paperwork when detective Haukur Gudmundsson walked in and told him, ‘Boss, we have a strange case.’

  The two couldn’t have looked more different; Haukur was every inch the bull-headed cop while Valtyr, with his long dark hair, suede jacket and white cheesecloth shirt, looked more like the manager of a rock band than an investigating magistrate. Valtyr had only been in the job for three years and was used to boring fare: thefts, drink driving or fines.

  Valtyr was ambitious, though, and maybe this could be the case that would get him out of this backwater and into Reykjavik, where everything happened. He decided early on he wasn’t going to rely on a pack of beagles roaming around the harbour and the lava fields. The Gudmundur Einarsson disappearance at the beginning of the year had been discussed a lot within police ranks. The force had been criticised for their decision to close down the investigation after less than a week, based on the assumption that Gudmundur had been lost in the carpet of lava.

  Valtyr felt this new case was different: ‘This was something special, I didn’t know if it was criminal, just strange.’

  He moved down to the Keflavik police station from his office, just him and two detectives – Haukur and another officer, John Hill – in an office not much bigger than a broom cupboard, with a sofa and a low desk. Valtyr told his small team, ‘This time we will do some real investigating.’

  A few days later, the first story appeared in the daily tabloid newspaper, Visir. There was a picture of the Hafnarbudin cafe and another of Geirfinnur, looking like a fifties throwback with a fine quiff. Geirfinnur looked nothing like this now but it was better than nothing.

  Valtyr thought the key to solving the case was to find the man who had phoned Geirfinnur and summoned him to his final meeting. They were convinced this call had been made from the Hafnarbudin just before Geirfinnur left his home. The police appealed for the man to come forward. They also had two important witnesses in the women who were in the cafe. The younger of the two, Elin Gretarsdottir, didn’t remember much, but Gudlaug Jonssdottir had a much clearer recollection of the caller that the police were trying to trace. Valtyr said they were ‘very different women, the young one was totally blank and the older one was the talk of the town, she couldn’t close her mouth’.

  Gudlaug remembered how a man came in ten minutes after Geirfinnur had left. When she asked if he wanted any help he seemed a bit agitated and replied that he was going to wait there. He asked if he could make a phone call. She didn’t hear what he said, but he left the money for the call afterwards and headed out of the cafe.

  She gave a clear description of him: slim about 1.80 metres tall with dark hair, wearing a fake leather jacket with a belt and light coloured pants. He smiled or grinned when he spoke. He seemed healthy; he wasn’t a junkie or a drunk. Elin didn’t get as good a view of him and her description of his face and hair was significantly different to Gudlaug’s. Valtyr commissioned an artist to do a drawing of the man but the two women couldn’t agree.

  The team’s inexperience in dealing with such cases started to show. They failed to check with the telephone company that the call from the cafe had indeed been to Geirfinnur’s house. By the time they thought of doing this, the information was no longer available. There is also an unwritten rule in a missing person investigation that the first suspect to be eliminated from the inquiry is the partner, who is also often the last person to see the missing person alive. It took Valtyr and Haukur a week to visit Geirfinnur’s wife, Gudni, despite the fact she lived in a house opposite their office. They didn’t interview her in their office but in her house. Gudni explained that it had been an odd evening. Geirfinnur had come home from work while she was washing up, rushing in asking what was wrong. ‘Weren’t you screaming? I heard a scream like you were being killed?’ he asked. Neither the TV or radio was on in the apartment and when they both went and checked where this sound could have come from, they found nothing. Later he had gone out with his friend Thordur but was back 20 minutes later. He was hardly in the house when he received a phone call and then was gone again, never to return.

  Valtyr and Haukur wanted to know more about Gudni’s husband, but Geirfinnur was a man of few words, even with his wife. He was calm and his wife had only ever seen him really angry once, when he was drunk. And yet it was not a happy marriage; Geirfinnur was always tired after work and showed little interest in their children or his wife. This indifference to her lead to months of bickering and she even suggested getting a divorce. Scared at the thought of losing his wife and family, his behaviour dramatically changed. He started helping around the house, doing the dishes, helping the children with their homework. Gudni was surprised at the transformation; he even bought her flowers, something he had never done before.

  His lack of interest in her until then, though, led to Gudni suggesting she might need ‘to look for love somewhere else’. Geirfinnur didn’t ask about this and the next day she asked if he would forgive her if she had an affair and he said he would. She had already embarked on a series of affairs that she had kept secret from Geirfinnur, but sitting on the couch in her living room, she revealed them to the police. These men were important potential leads – maybe they had a grudge against Geirfinnur or perhaps he had found out about their relationships with his wife? But Valtyr Sigurdsson chose not to pursue this: ‘I didn’t judge, it was a private matter.’

  The Keflavik investigators were under enormous pressure and out of their depth. When he arrived in 1971, Valtyr Sigurdsson had found the magistrate’s office was a mess. He had started to organise it, but this case was still beyond them. ‘The office was incapable of dealing with it, I had no experience, nothing, no jurisdiction,’ he admitted. He wanted the better equipped and more experienced Reykjavik office to take on the case but they wouldn’t bite. ‘They didn’t want it, everyone was scared of the publicity and that Geirfinnur would appear and we would be a laughing stock. I had that feeling.’ He was stuck with the case.fn1

  Soon phone calls started coming in from members of the public. There were strange ones, such as a witness who had seen two men fighting and one repeatedly telling the other, ‘You killed a man in Keflavik.’ He gave a description of the man which probably covered half the young male population. Despite Valtyr’s feeling that he could just show up, there was an extensive search for Geirfinnur: divers plunged into Keflavik harbour, and teams scoured the rugged coast
line and the lava fields of Reykjanes, but, like Gudmundur Einarsson earlier that year, he had vanished without a trace.

  Journalists were eager for any titbits about the investigation. A week after he went missing, stories began appearing in the newspapers about Geirfinnur Einarsson. One carried the headline ‘The Crimes Behind the Disappearance of Keflavik Man’, alluding to a theory that he could have been caught up in smuggling. Haukur and Valtyr gave an interview to Morgunbladid newspaper where they revealed the case was being treated as a murder enquiry. Valtyr said they had a very good description of a man who had phoned Geirfinnur from the Hafnarbudin cafe. Publicly he may have put on a brave face, but Valtyr knew he didn’t have a clear idea what the mystery caller looked like as the witnesses couldn’t agree on a description.

  The investigation had limited resources, so the Keflavik team gratefully accepted an offer from an artist, who was the wife of a police officer, to make a clay head of the mystery caller. The witnesses could then look at it and make any modifications before it was unveiled. Gudlaug Jonssdottir, the cafe worker who’d had a clear view of the man, had been shown various photographs to see if they matched the caller. One of those photos was of Magnus Leopoldsson, the manager of Klubburin, Reykjavik’s main nightclub. The police had been after Leopoldsson for a while. In 1972 they had closed down Klubburin as they suspected it was selling smuggled alcohol. The club’s owner appealed to the Justice Minister, Olafur Johanesson, who said the closure was unlawful and ordered the club re-opened. But Gudlaug was adamant he wasn’t the man in the cafe.

  On 26 November, exactly a week after Geirfinnur went missing, Gudlaug was in her apartment in Keflavik watching the evening news when she saw the clay head for the first time. Valtyr had agreed to let the reporters photograph and film the head with a promise not to publish it, as he still had doubts that the bust indeed represented the mystery caller and it had not yet been shown to the two witnesses. His lack of experience showed, as the press ignored any supposed deal they had, and the bust was shown on TV and in newspapers and dubbed ‘Leirfinnur’ or ‘Clayfinnur’.